It probably qualifies as self-harm, but I set my alarm clock to NPR instead of a buzzer every morning. This probably ends up with me waking up even more angry and agitated than with a buzzer, but whatever.
Marketplace, PRI's economy news segment, runs for the last 8 minutes of the hour. One of their useless 2 minute interviews drifted towards discussion of a UBI, and then the guest said this:
The problem with a UBI is that it gives money to rich people as well as poor people. If you give everyone $1200, the poor will spend it while the rich will put it in their bank accounts, increasing inequality in the long run.
I'm somewhat UBI-skeptical, but this seemed self-evidently stupid to me. But the more I think about it the more I realize that that's not true. It's an ever-expanding spiral of stupid. It's illuminatingly stupid. Every prior that went into it is stupid. Every implication of it is stupid. It's just an incredible Zen Koan of Liberalism. You could fill a book with all the reasons this is not-even-wrong and the implications it makes against the ideology of the person who said it.
I kind of don't want to write down any more of my thoughts here, just like you wouldn't explain a Koan. I just want to provide this to you guys to contemplate with me.
The real problem I see with UBI is that it's basically privatizing welfare. The reason these new money billionaires are all for it is that they want to be the ones to decide how much and to distribute it. Cutting the government, and therefore and semblance of societal accountability, out of it. And god knows what a Musk UBI would actually look like in terms of means testing. It also has the benefit of cutting taxes even more. If they're providing UBI, why also tax them for social security and medicare and other social welfare programs?
This seems so obvious that I would assume NPR are being obtuse on purpose. They know what the fuck this is but they're just providing false opposition.